Andrew's Old Stories 1957-2001: March 2025

Sunday, 23 March 2025

Introduction

This is a repost of a tiny portion of my original website: I published some of this in my poetry book - see "buy poetry" on the banner menu on my main blog here - here are all travels & travails.

Note: as this is a set-piece, posts are in chronological order - oldest at top, the reverse of default settings - to follow sequentially as in the book.

Find also old poetry & writings from the original website, some of which are in the book.

Escape from the Iron Curtain Map [Previous ¦ Next]

October 1956 saw the invasion of Budapest, Hungary by Yuri Andropov's Soviet tanks. My parents were pregnant with me, and decided that if they ever were going to emigrate, it better be done before I was born - crossing the border in secret with a babe in arms would be well nigh impossible. So Dad got a permit from his employer underhanded (Dad was a geologist working in coal mines then, and his boss, um, left in his drawer the signed notice that allowed him to leave town for work). They went to the New Year's eve party of a friend, who alone knew they would not return home that night. They boarded instead the train bound for the Austrian border, and when police control came by they stayed in the toilets - those were simply holes in the wagon floor, so you can imagine an eight-month pregnant mother enjoying the draft on a cold December night! They disembarked, paid off a farmer boy who led them to the mine fields along the border, which was just being closed after the unrest. They thread their way past the miradors across the border river Laita frozen at this time of the year. Austria was nominally neutral, but it happened to dispatch empty postal lorries along its eastern border, to pick up refugees on foot and ship them to a disaffected train station in Vienna. It had been converted into an immigrant processing center, to which converged head-hunters from Canada, South Africa and Australia among others. Hungarian refugees were mostly white-collar workers with some means and unattached to the land, and thus a rich crop for nations in post-war growth.

Out of the frying pan into the fire Map [Previous ¦ Next]

Dad worked as a geologist for the international team of French national oil company Elf-Aquitaine, and the north African Sahara region was just yielding its riches to seismic and drilling investigation. We thus went to Algiers, but unfortunately landed amidst a revolution, when local chiefly Muslim Arabic people were pushing the colonial French into the sea - we moved seven times in the six months we spent there, and I clearly remember tying my shoelaces the first time outside in the driveway to the boom of distance howitzers. A pump jockey was shot dead for serving gasoline to my Dad's French car - I sat across the window glass when the sharp pop was followed by the thud of a body, the roar of the engine and squealing of tires as my Dad sped off.

Life stories: 1963

Nirvana at last [Previous ¦ Next]

After the desert debacle, my Dad was offered a plum posting in Brisbane, on the northeastern coast of Australia. We traveled widely thru North America (New York, Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Dallas and LA), S. Pacific (Tahiti, Fiji, New Guinea), SE Asia (Philippines, Japan, Kampuchea, Hong- Kong, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and India no less than twice), as my Dad's firm sent us abroad and then back home at regular intervals as expatriates. My parents could afford all they wanted, a new company car, a large house with veranda and lush tropical garden, delightfully open Aussies and tightly-knit expats (expatriates), private school for me, bridge for Mum, field work in the vast Australian interior for Dad, long road trips up the Queensland coast and the Great Barrier Reef, down New South Wales and the Snowy Mountains. I learned English in no time in the streets with a very broad Queensland accent, ran barefoot and half naked, indulged in swimming, rugby and cricket, and started a 30 year-long love affair with horseback riding and pets. Life was good, at last.

Family ties [Previous ¦ Next]

After escaping Hungary and living halfway across the world, my parents finally felt ready to face family again, and we visited both grandmothers in Southern France and Dad's brother's family in Geneva. We daren't return to Hungary, because we had no citizenship as yet. My Mum's Dad had died in prison, having been part of the pre-communist régime, though her Mum lived on alone for almost 30 years (I was closest to her, though I rarely saw her). My Dad's Dad suffered from depression and already could not travel. My uncle was also an expat in Sudan, part of communist régime's help in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, which wreaked so much havoc for example in Cuba and Vietnam. My uncle was to die soon of untreated cancer, ironic considering that he taught medicine. Resulting unresolved and/or unexpressed grief from my Dad, would further add to tension in the family. For example he would leave for months in the bush for his job and never call back, when I never believed he could not.

Second home and citizenship [Previous ¦ Next]

Mum and Dad and I returned to Pau in southwestern France at the end of an expat cycle, and now we were able to gain French citizenship (our first opportunity was in Algiers when everyone knew he'd be conscripted if naturalised, and our second opportunity was in Brisbane that had no French consulate or embassy, so our application for naturalisation got delayed over a decade). Interestingly enough, only two countries did not let us in with out titre de voyage, travel document, in all our worldly travels until then... by which time I had been around the world twice at age ten! My parents bought an apartment and finally decided that France was it. My Mum having had a hemorrhage after my birth, had not been able to conceive since, but new treatments allowed her to have my sister and brother 18 months apart, over a dozen years after me. Her body took it hard however at age 40 as she was never strong physically, and was ridden by depression as we would learn later. So I ended up raising my siblings as a teen, which proved a disaster for me and an effective psychological contraceptive for my next 25 years...

I worked hard and well through school, and life was good next to the Pyrénées mountains, where Dad bought a condo and I skied and hiked a lot. Also renewed my love affair with horse and pet, in a town with long-standing British traditions (Pau boasted golf-course, casino and horseback riding facilities since the early XIX c., when Wellington fell in love with the place upon returning from a Spanish military campaign). My parents' efforts that I keep up my English also helped me maintain an English-French duality that would become critical later on.

Life stories: 1975

The end of a cycle [Previous ¦ Next]

I earned my baccalauréat with much difficulty, but forged lifelong friendships with three boys and a girl (one boy would die of cancer later, and the girl was to be lost and found again on the internet after 25 years). They were surrogate family, who helped negotiate my challenging teens. I was confused around homeland, got caught up in French student demonstrations and basically learned to dislike France. Civil law didn't sit well with me (one is deemed guilty until proven innocent, unlike common law I knew in Australia), neither did the French manifesto liberté, égalité, fraternité (I thought freedom encouraged initiative and inevitably lead to inequality, while equality maintained by government rules curtailed freedom, and the brotherhood of man did not look good in my world travels and turbulent family history): For example one always had to carry positive identification, and I was once hauled off to the police station during a demonstration in 1968; I was an innocent bystander who left his papers at home, at age 11 when politics and papers are not one's greatest concern!

My parents were also on a down cycle after paradise down under in Australia: Dad's career shunted aside, Mum's weak health, and siblings kicking up all manner of unresolved issues as young ones will do. Closer proximity to Hungary helped little, as we dared not return until well after our naturalisation, just before my Dad's Dad went into the night after a life at dusk. I would later learn that depression is the silent killer, is passed down-generation, and quietly oppresses close ones unawares. It would remain undiagnosed for half my parents' life. I seriously considered escaping this to become a priest, but then again I was wracked by self- inconsistencies, which were to haunt Catholicism in the new millennium. I took a keen interest in both early Christian and early Medieval history, as I saw there the seeds of modern events.

Life stories: 1977

New beginnings [Previous ¦ Next]

My parents moved to Calgary, and that gave me another escape route. I joined them later to become a landed immigrant and finish my education in geology in Canada. The decision, the wide open skies, a world that reminded my of Australia in its people if not its climate, all added up to a renewed life and belief in myself. I plunged head-long into Canada and turned my back to France, and as it would turn out later, my family. I was on top of the world and thought I could do it alone, carrying on the splendid isolation men are trained to. The western Canadian prairies, the eastern slopes and central ranges of the Rocky mountains, the long dry winters and a small friendly university, an honest a friendly people all helped me develop a parallel life to my parents' where I lived.

Little did I realise the developing rift between Mum and Dad, as she too found freedom and ended her education started in Paris when we emigrated! How did I not see that Dad dreamed of a son with the same career who would return with him at the end of his expat cycle? Or that siblings were bystanders deemed helpless by my parents... that Calgarians reflected what they saw, thus my parents would push themselves back home, as I watched them go back where I no longer belonged? Parents will not reject their own at first, so they sought to blame Calgary and thus were blind to my decision. I would call it home for twenty years, the longest I'd lived anywhere, and thus consider myself Canadian.

Life stories: 1980

Riding into the sunset [Previous ¦ Next]

A trio of events capped this. My entire family acquired our second citizenships, Mum and I graduated within a year of each other, and I met my first wife-to-be. A native Calgarian, artist and horsewoman, she was soon to be blamed for my earlier decision to call Calgary home. An interesting flip happened actually: in our three year courtship her conservative parents were horrified, while mine looked on benignly (deep inside they love Calgarians, but I doubt they admitted it to themselves). When we got married her parents heaved a sigh of relief and I gained a second family, while mine panicked at the implication that I would not return to France. The wedding was all my in-laws', and it would usher a decade-long cold war with my parents that would only end with that marriage.

Supernova [Previous ¦ Next]

Every bill eventually comes due: when we returned to Calgary from Kingston to marry and start my career in petroleum, we were actually heading to a black hole. My parents went supernova when they discovered my life direction, just as they headed back to their home in France. My family life thus collapsed into a nucleus of two, and I looked for no support. Sure we bought a house straight out of college, started work at Shell and rode our horses daily, but I was to dig my own grave in not resolving my own issues around father, family and societal acceptance. I lost my job in the shrinking oil sector, and found odd jobs in geology that kept me going, but I was anaesthetising myself against past hurts that drove me astray.

Entrepreneur [Previous ¦ Next]

Three years' contract at the Geological Survey was all a Canadian federal agency could offer (they had been previously sued to hire, when they were deemed then to control one's workplace). I kept my stride however in starting a joint venture with another geophysical firm, for whom I was to offer mapping a geographic information system (GIS) services, while continuing work at the Geological Survey (now safe from aforementioned suits). I call that period my untitled MBA: little did I know if it was hard ot start a venture, it was even harder to wind it down; my joint venture partner ran into trouble at the biggest bust in the petroleum sector, and a recession is very real when even the federal government has to cut back its programs (this was the beginning of the irresistible urge for politicians to cut entire segments of civil service: it gave them rapid returns in cutting deficit at the expense of social contracts, launched by the French revolution and British industrial revolution; ironically this new trend was ushered in by British PM Thatcher and brought across the Atlantic by US President Reagan).

"Second souffle" (second wind) [Previous ¦ Next]

I had buried myself in my entrepreneurship and neglected family life, so that when the firm went so did my marriage. My in-laws put as much money into launching that firm as I put into the house, so we forgave each others' loans, called it quits and had a free-and- clear divorce. This was not about personalities but about priorities: either my wife kept the horses and got a paying job to help with upkeep, or she maintain her thriving studio but not the horses; the answer was no to both so I exited left stage, and ended up with $50 to my name. No-one noticed that's about the same as what my parents started with as émigrés, but I noticed that at least I was settled in a country I loved. I suppose that not having had any kids in almost a decade was not insignificant. This break would however put me on the path to real growth, upon all that I learned so far in my variegated life. Reality is what you make it, so I started with forgiving in my heart all ills I perceived my parents to have begotten. I told them too, but if they were unable to hear me then, later events suggest that it had seated in deep recesses of their consciousness; I wrote about: people are good regardless of their behaviour in a recent poem.

"Entre deux eaux" (transition) [Previous ¦ Next]

I bounced around various contracts and volunteer opportunities for quite a while. I tried out new ventures, digitising in Guyana, real-time 3D computer software in defense and aerospace, publishing via new encryption on CD-ROMs and the internet, creating digital databases from satellite imagery on a new supercomputer in Calgary, and brokering data providers in the resource industry in Canada and US. None of these amounted to much in the long run, especially no income: I realised that while I was well engaged in geographic information systems (GIS), I could not do it outside of my original profession of petroleum geology. I also helped organise short courses in various fields like GIS, geostatistics and probability, but none of these connections furthered my career much.

Throughout all this I had an equally rich extra-curricular career. I capped a decade in the Ski Patrol system, which allowed me to ski freely and well, as well as offer service to society; first aid however took its toll, as little was known or done about post-traumatic stress disorder. I also helped the Calgary Folk Music Festival, and ran its computers which freed me up to enjoy performances during the festival itself. I also started counseling through the Pastoral Institute, which lead me to examine my own issues and get a grip on my melancholy. I joined a hiking group that allowed free associations and friendships. I found it hard to stay unattached as everything in society seemed to be geared toward couples &/or families. Also I found it hard to find male friends, as I was to learn later that we are trained to separate. With female friends I confused being close with having sex. This lead to one disastrous and one useful relationship prior to meeting my future wife. Our wedding day between Christmas and New Year turned out to be the coldest of the year - a third of the invitees couldn't start their cars or open their doors at -39, where Celsius and Fahrenheit scales merge - we figured it could only warm up from then on!

Life stories: 1994

New career [Previous ¦ Next]

A decade after I left my first employer, Shell, and my original petroleum geological career, I had firmly set my sights onto computing geology, and more specifically geographic information systems (GIS). It would take me another five years to land on my feet at the premier GIS company worldwide, but everything seemed to gradually converge toward that: my flexibility toward changing directions when the job market demanded it, an intuition which I trust even when poorly understood at first, an ability to listen to clients and friends and sort out the real issues, and a global outlook which allows to see things in different contexts and formulate new answers. Take my languages for example: I learned French, Hungarian and English in rapid succession as a toddler, then German, Latin and Spanish as a teen; I thus was fluent in the first batch and had a good grasp of grammar and syntax in the last batch - did you know I was in the last cohort in French lycées or high school, to take a full eight years of Latin... the last one conversational as we'd run out of written materials? - I used this however as an adult not as languages per se, but as an ability to pick up programming languages with no formal training in computer science!

New home, for now Map index [Previous ¦ Next]

I eventually was hired by a small engineering firm who engaged in GIS, and was subsequently bought out by a large petroleum software firm, in turn gobbled up by one of the largest: Halliburton. I thus regretfully moved from Calgary after 20 years to Dallas, not an obvious adjustment to one of the consumer capitals in the US deep south (pars of the US southeast with traditions going back to separatism, land ownership and slavery prior to the American Civil War). We found our tribe however, through work and African drumming for me, yoga and dance for Sandra, and re-evaluation counseling plus the Unitarian Church for both of us. Sandra had a non-working US visa so she took a break from ten years work with mental health agencies and an education certificate, took her Texas Mediation Certificate and then we had Petra. We managed to find a natural birthing clinic amid the medical-industrial complex, where insurance virtually governs the delivery and quality of medical treatment - quite an adjustment for us who lived in UK, Australia, France and Canada with universal health care and education.

A year of moving [Previous ¦ Next]

While we found our place in Dallas, we certainly didn't call Texas home and I started looking afield to our next step - I had a good job at Landmark however, more stable after being bought by giant Halliburton. So I found a job near London where lot a the new development in my area were happening; only problem is that it took me a year to execute the move, and we had to move to Houston in the meantime: Houston was really Landmark's headquarters and Dallas was a waning office, and try as I may, I couldn't get telecommuting to work even though communications were excellent (fast internet and hopping airplanes there like buses or trains elsewhere!).

Millenium [Previous ¦ Next]

No sooner was I done with the Y2K project at BP that I turned onto other projects which took me to UAE and Oman, Nigeria, France and Scotland. Again a lot of traveling in project work, that taxed my time with my family - even though Sandra was 'at home', I loved this work and Petra was happy near her gramps, this was not to last forever as it was. My next project lay in Kazakhstan, which may have been a great adventure as a younger bachelor but not with family with the brewing geopolitics of that area. It didn't help that while the previous fall was glorious, this year would turn into the wettest on record, since data were kept starting in 1865 (little did we know then that three years later would see the hottest summer on record, at least we didn't witness both...)! We spent lovely summer holidays nonetheless in the Devon near Bishop's Lydiard and Minehead - lush hill country as you imagine it from romantic English writers, some of whom frequented the adjacent Quantox Hills. We were also southwest of London which is Jane Austen territory, and Sandra's a fan of hers, as well as lots of airplane and automobile history which I grew up with in Australia (Brisbane was far more British than anyone would admit to then!)... My highlight were the fireworks in the 'real Millennium as the English called it, that is January 1 of 2001 not 2000! Barges were set up along the river Thames from Greenwich (the astronomic base for mean time) to Windsor (the royal residence) - not only were the fireworks a sight to behold form each barge, but they were lit in sequence upstream from east to west at the exact second when each barge was at the midnight! Petra slept through it, but what struck me was the quietness of the crown - there were hundred of thousands pressed along hte banks in central London, and never did I feel in any danger of sudden crowd movements or stampedes (not my experience at the 14 Juillet fireworks in Paris a few years prior, where kids threw firecrackers into a smaller crowd which grew restless as a result).

New home, for now [Previous ¦ Next]

My first year at "the Institute" or ESRI is a real rush. I find out why the speedy hiring, I had a petroleum show (the PUG or Petroleum User Group) to manage mid-February, with my boss' micro-management irking me as much as that in Dallas, the more things change... On the other hand that summer my first international show (the UC or User Conference) is also a real shock, as my boss cut me totally loose and I hosted almost a hundred petrol-heads among almost ten thousand geo enthusiasts - I knew that Esri co-founders Jack & Laura Dangermond had an almost cult following, but there I got it full on. I learned through our back neighbour - part of the terrible three with Jack and former petrol manager whose passing prompted my hiring - that Jack had a miserly youth (he shared ice cream cones wit hhis brother now running Dangermond Nurseries just up the road from Esri, next to Nader Auto Cars from yes, you guessed it, Ralph Nader's family) despite the fact they own a good part of the land, he was real trouble in school so much so that they sent him to Harvard just to get him out of town (that would put him @ Harvard Graphics Lab that lead to early computer mapping, and the rest as they say is history), and the he and Laura belonged to religious cult once (when asked a difficult question, Jack would bow his head and ruffle his hair, a latent reaction from days when he protected himself thusly when books were actually thrown at him). But that had a lasting effect on his company Esri - a tightly held private corporation with no shareholders, thus no-one knows its actual value, so don't believe any valuation - which they ran as their extensive family... at ~ 2,500 hirees then they considered to have that many children of sorts, and the 10,000 UC attendees their extended family. And Esri had truly a sound business model: software sales paid for R&D (meaning that as sales went up&down then software releases were simply brought up or delayed), maintenance revenue paid for salaries and infrastructure (this was rock solid after almost 40 yrs so that employment was super secure... so much so that sales people worked for salary sans commission), voila!

Slumber-J [Previous ¦ Next]

As a roughneck in my university summers on drilling rigs in Northern Alberta, Canada, I often saw blue trucks from Schlumberger then red trucks from Halliburton - the ones to lower logging tools into the borehole and measure underlying rock formations, the others to perform cementing or fracturing jobs and prepare a well for production. Roughnecks and tool-pushers on those rigs often came from nearby ranches to supplement their income, as farming was marginal even in those days and hourly pay on the rigs very good. Well folks, S-c-h-l-u-m-b-e-r-g-e-r was quite a handful to spell out when filling out work orders and contract sheets. Ranchers on the other hand were used, in branding cattle and for variety in symbols, to turn a letter on its side and call it “slumber-{letter}”. It’s not hard then to imagine that a phonetically correct Slumber-J (instead of Schlumberger) easily headed many a work order signed in Northern Alberta before the blue trucks rushed off to the next job... My bottom entry shows an updated scenario illustrating another transition from Rig to computeR.

Work stories: 1978

"Little old Lady from Calgary-a" [Previous ¦ Next]

As a student I took a computer course, just to please my teaching supervisor! The University of Calgary Computer Science Department has a bank of mainframes, complete with deck readers, card punchers, shelves for computer printouts, and a scheduling board to book your time (only hockey rinks were booked later at 2AM) on a time share system using JCL (job control language). I believe it was an IBM mainframe, or perhaps a DEC VAX, but its claim to fame was this: Jim Gosling broke into the system just to prove to Comp. Sci. that he was worthy of empolyment there, and the rest as they say is history (hint: he started Java and went onto Sun Microsystems, like many a Canadian export).

So the final project on my Comp. Sci. 101 class was to simulate a skin disease by having noughts and ones eat each other according to certain rules across a virtual flatscape (think Flatland and the Game of Life, you can google it). But try as I may I couldn't get the @#$%^&* program to work! So I go see my TA the Friday it was due, and he said to stew over it over the weekend and come in on Monday to tell him the result. So on Sunday night I hoof it over to the lab, as that was the only free time slot to run jobs iteratively until they worked. So I stood beside this little old lady by the card punch, and guess what? She was cussing about these letter O's and number Zero's that are indistinguishable to her poor eyesight (don't ask me what a retiree was doing punching cards, it takes all sorts I guess). Bingo! I realised I was careless in my Os and 0s (see it you can tell which is which just there LOL), corrected my code and voila! the printouts were ready in a flash and my TA was happy Monday morning. To say the a little old lady saved my belief in computers is a understatement.

Work stories: 1981

Opportunities and Operating Systems [Previous ¦ Next]

August saw the launch of IBM’s PC, primitive as it was with 64 Kb RAM and no floppy disk! The operating system, PC-DOS that became MS-DOS outside IBM, was however on a roll (as was the IBM PC whose open specs fostered a hardware aftermarket that made all the difference with respect to Apple, that remained proprietary). How ironic then, that despite Apple and Unix launching the windowing desktop from Xerox, it was Microsoft Windows based on DOS that took over the desktop a decade later...

That summer I was in grad school, still boot-strapping a mainframe word processor with 8 in. diskettes; I remember learning to back up files early on, since an as-yet-unknown keystroke combination sorted my thesis alphabetically: and did it ever do it fast too… talk about “zero to dumb in under one second”!

Work stories: 1985

Arctic Islands [Previous ¦ Next]

I spent a short summer in the High Arctic with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC): do you know why the central airport in the Canadian high Arctic is at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island? Not only is it very near the magnetic pole (little one can do about that), but it's amidst a well-know perennial fog-bank in the summer (something could've been done about it, read on).

A coincidence in geology and geography made Siberia and northern Alberta very similar. Both had two petroleum provinces mid-continent in the foothills of orogenic belts, with shallow clastic and deep reef oil and gas deposits in significant amounts. And both were plains of rather higher elevation against mountain ranges with short summers and long days, and long dry winters. As Canada was not involved in the Cold War (indeed Kennedy suspected Trudeau sympathised with Krushtchev), there was a natural affinity and petroleum technology was freely exchanged across the N Pole. Then every two weeks a charter flights flew over the pole from Calgary to Novosibirsk. [For a weird twist of Cold War era geopolitics, see this here].

Geo/SQL [Previous ¦ Next]

My start in geographic info systems (GIS) was at the Geological Survey of Canada: I compiled Arctic Islands geology in a database management system, and sent files to Ottawa headquarters for referencing against ESRI coverages (electronic map sheets) prepared at the federal mapping agency in Canada's capital. I went on to joint-venture with a geophysical company, who also needed such digital data capture services. I ended up working with Bill who later founded Geo/SQL, because we had both devised an AutoCAD front-end to Oracle and DB2, which was in high demand in the oil industry. I initially met people at Chevron, Gulf and Texaco in Calgary who saw an immediate need in posting wells and plotting pipeline routes (seismic was deemed to be a more difficult and later task). Bill was a surveyor who programmed a 10Kb geospatial kernel that handled re-projections of data in the AutoCAD window, and fetched data from Oracle or DB2 via structured query language (SQL).

Windows [Previous ¦ Next]

Landmark Graphics said it sold to Microsoft the brand name Windows, from its early graphical front-end to applications and databases called OpenWindows (note that Sun Microsystems has a documentation interface by the same name). The prefix "Open" survived as a brand name in Landmark's flagship petroleum database OpenWorks and OpenExplorer (see Enigma), until the advent of a company called OpenSpirit and a show called Oracle OpenWorld.

Work stories: 1988

Enigma Software [Previous ¦ Next]

I joined a small startup company who took a hashing algorithm, originally written for the Texas School Board library program to catalogue books in that very large state. We stored on CD-ROMs and indexed for ultra-fast retrieval the entire well data set for the province of Alberta, Canada. It then added production and the same for the rest of western Canada on two more CDs, which were updated monthly and sold to oil companies by subscription - CDs were so uncommon then, that CD readers had to be leased to subscribers!

The data came from a local regulatory quirk: after two years operators had to make public all well and production data, which the Provincial government became maintained but did not distribute; a cottage industry developed in Calgary around that, and resulted in a comprehensive data set in the third largest petroleum province in the world. 150,000 wells were however not easy to store and retrieve, except by major oil companies with significant databasing facilities.

The CD-ROMs were a hit for small-to-medium companies, and they rapidly demanded a graphical user interface to the text searching front-end. I found a group of consultants called Enigma (some of whom were from Texaco and Chevron - see Geo/SQL), would have gladly added a GUI had the owner agreed to it - again, mapping and GIS were not yet in vogue! I went on to another data vendor, who also created later a mapping front-end to its data-delivery system (see Munro).

Work stories: 1989

Prizm Consortium [Previous ¦ Next]

Proprietary data formats were causing oil companies and vendors to constantly read-write and re-write data from one format to another. One operator in Calgary, Canada got a data vendor and a software company to agree to a set of standards - respectively Gulf Canada, Digitech and Finder (now ChevronTexaco, IHS Energy and Schlumberger Info Services by way of Chevron, QC Data and GeoQuest respectively...). Data standards had been tried before, but they tended to reflect the old IT school - monolithic data models by programmers, for programmers that took significant efforts to maintain and update. The Prizm Consortium as it was called became the Public Petroleum Data Model Association, with a business-driven set of standards written as Oracle scripts to reflect both client and vendor needs. It exists to this day, unlike others gone with the vagaries of their respective sponsors.

Work stories: 1992

Metronet, DiscoveryPlace.com, etc. [Previous ¦ Next]

Calgary was decidedly a hotbed of petroleum computing: over 500 energy companies crammed into a 10 square block of downtown with an comprehensive set of local data available from one government agency. That did not escape the attention of another agency, the then Alberta Government Telephone: they laid down optical fiber in most buildings for free, as a loss-leader to collect transaction fees among linked energy companies and data and software vendors. The bargain paid off as there rapidly emerged the largest WAN (wide-area network), coinciding with the advent of client-server hardware environment and open standard databases like Oracle.

The Metronet as that WAN was called, fostered other ventures but luck was running out. Fujitsu installed a large parallel supercomputer to help energy companies outsource very large data transaction processes, but that never flew. A precursor to portals was Discovery Place launched by another agency, the Alberta Research Council. It failed ironically because the optically wired city was actually slower in espousing the internet and its portals - what compelling reason had anyone to access abroad what already existed at home?

Work stories: 1994

Munro Engineering [Previous ¦ Next]

I went on to do various projects in GIS and data management in petroleum and also utilities and defense (real-time tracking along trunk lines and shipping lanes, published in GISworld) before returning to my alma mater. Munro Engg. had a GIS front-end to data warehouses finally hired me - imagine my excitement in not only finding a like-minded company, but also meeting again the old Enigma crew! That company went on to be bought by Landmark, except for the non-petroleum part who tackled the US market – having been eaten alive by the likes of ArcView and MapInfo, the entire team ended up at AutoDesk. As Munro had http hooks well before anyone knew or cared what the internet was, thus was born AutoDesk’s internet application MapGuide (AutoDesk went on to purchase another Canadian liquidation, Vision which became Design for data management).

Meanwhile back at the ranch 'n "gooddol' Tey-xas", petroleum Argus was killed by Landmark, who was commissioned by a British firm to create an Geographic Info System (GIS) front-end to their petroleum Oracle database - OpenExplorer is the product I supported until joining ESRI, creators of ArcView GIS used here. That product sells the most runtime ArcView for ESRI, and inspired most competitors in that space to adopt a similar front-end – most companies also demand ArcView for the ease of use in Unix and NT, and data interoperability through shape files, which became the format standard for GIS data through its open data specification.

Work stories: 1998

In the trenches [Previous ¦ Next]

Implementing OpenExplorer at Landmark client sites around the world, I most often ended up working side-by-side with GeoQuest teams (see Y2K). I also started to work on software by ESRI, for whose product ArcView we would sell the most runtime licenses - little did I know where that would lead me eventually! In the meantime, major accounts often split Landmark applications and GeoQuest data management, so project teams always worked together with clients, while marketing pitched the two companies against each other; this wasn’t always a smooth process, and it reminded of a purported event in 1914: at the beginning if World War I [1], Canadian and German soldiers apparently celebrated Christmas together above the trenches... and the next day resumed shooting each other! Metaphors aside, clients quickly saw the benefits of GIS front-ends to data warehouses, and demand for similar functionality increased radically after a slow start – the benefit of GIS in data management was taking hold of the petroleum industry’s imagination.

1: in the euphoria at the beginning, what was briefly called the gallant war was thought to be over next spring; the war to end all wars as it was later called, marked the transition from chivalresque charges of the light brigade (as in the Crimean War over 50 years earlier), to grinding trench and tank warfare: the horrendous human sacrifice, barely abated by large-scale deployment of the Red Cross (also started in Crimea), was also a dim glimmer of what would follow a mere 25 years later during World War II...

Work stories: 1999

Diatomite [Previous ¦ Next]

One of my more successful data management projects was at Aera Energy in Bakersfield CA. Just north of LA across the Grapevine (a cross range caused by a seaward bend of the San Andreas Fault), lie a forest of oil wells on sub-acre spacing, almost a hundred years in age. Oil seeps belie a field so rich, that one simply drills and finds heavy crude just light enough to produce by steam-flooding (the project consisted of improving data management processes with the intent of reducing steam injection costs, and we'd get a cut of the savings... one way to leap into the big league!).

Y2K (Year 2000) [Previous ¦ Intro]

Few periods in computing history saw so much effort put into and so little learned from, than the months running up to the year 2000. It started as a fair enough concern that old computer code, written decades ago to save space and thus entering dates as two (98) rather than four digits (1998), would not know how to interpret the year when it turned to 00, as 2000 or 1900? Snake-oil peddlers and honest managers alike got caught up in a maelstrom that went over the new millennium without even a pop, except for the noise created by the self-styled fear of Y2K.